Jimmy Carter and Us

It was Several days after Bob Scheer and I had interviewed Jimmy Carter during the final session on July 21, 1976, at his home in Plains. Scheer, who had spent three months following Carter around, questioning him in half-hour bursts that would eventually total about five hours of taped conversations, had gone back to Berkeley to write the article that would accompany the November Playboy Interview. I was sitting with Playboy Editorial Director Arthur Kretchmer in our Chicago offices, listening to the tape of that final session. We had listened to an hour of serious questions--and candid answers--on such topics as abortion, health care, tax reform, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the Mayaguez incident, amnesty, morality in foreign policy and President Ford's intelligence. I commented aloud to Kretchmer on how quiet it had become in Carter's living room when I had asked him how he dealt with the possibility of assassination. We heard the voice of press aide Rex Granum, who had sat in on the session, telling us that time was up.

"This is another interesting part coming up," I said to Kretchmer as we heard voices saying goodbye.

On tape, Scheer could be heard asking Carter if he'd seen the movie Lenny and how he'd liked it. Then me, saying that the interview would be published shortly before the election, "so credit us or blame us," and there was the sound of laughter. There were loud bumps and other noises as we gathered up our taping equipment and moved toward Carter's doorway. Then there was my voice:

"You know, Governor, what I think will be interesting in this interview is the, ah, religious stuff. For what it's worth, the one question most of my friends ask about is that--the rigidity, how to get past that." (The remark was later changed into a more formal question for publication, incorporating Playboy's editorial we.)

We heard Carter's soft-spoken reply:

"I don't know if you've been to Sunday school here yet; some of the press has attended----"

"No, haven't had a chance," said Scheer.

"We had a good class last Sunday," Carter continued. "It's a good way to learn what I believe and what the Baptists believe. One thing the Baptists believe in is complete autonomy. I don't accept any domination of my life by the Baptist Church, none----"

Here my voice broke in:

"I'm taking mental notes, Governor, if you don't mind."

"Nah," said Carter.

"It's OK," said Scheer. "I'm taking real notes." (Scheer, who had been holding his microphone a couple of feet from Carter as we stood in the doorway, pointed to his tape recorder as he said this.)

"Good," said Carter, and he laughed. He continued without pausing: "Every Baptist church is individual and autonomous.... When my sons were small, we went to church and they went, too. But when they got old enough to make their own decisions, they decided when to go----"

Scheer interjected, "You never forced them to go, right?"

"No, and they varied in their devoutness...." Carter continued. "I never knew anything except going to church. My wife and I were born and raised in innocent times. The normal thing to do was to go to church.

"What Christ taught about most was pride, that one person should never think he was better than anybody else.... The thing that's drummed into us all the time is not to be proud, not to be better than anyone else, not to look down on people....

"I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it, anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, 'I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.' "

Kretchmer and I listened to the rest of the tape, which included Carter's use of the vernacular words screw and shack up, and ended with this strong statement:

"I don't inject these beliefs in my answers to your secular questions. But I don't think I would ever take on the same frame of mind that Nixon or Johnson did--lying, cheating and distorting the truth. Not taking into consideration my hope for my strength of character, I think that my religious beliefs alone would prevent that from happening to me. I have that confidence. I hope it's justified."

After a few seconds of silence, Kretchmer said, "That's some interview. And quite an honest man."

"Yes, I think so," I said.

"Some strong language there," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "But it's odd. When we were standing there, what struck me the most, where I think he was being the most honest, was where he said, "My wife and I were born and raised in innocent times.' "

Then I related an incident that had occurred the same day of the interview. Scheer and I were eating in a restaurant near Plains that was filled with press people. We overheard a couple of reporters discussing how a wire-service man had badgered Granum about what "those two guys from Playboy" had asked Carter. "Tell me this much," the newsman had said. "Did they ask him about his sex life?"

And Granum had apparently replied, "Yeah, sort of." Scheer and I looked at each other, puzzled. We had never raised the topic.

•

The final session had taken place during Carter's summer hiatus, as he relaxed after the nomination. During the next three weeks, as we raced toward our magazine deadline, the campaign went back into full swing and Carter and his press secretary, Jody Powell, were traveling constantly. It made communication with them difficult, if not impossible. Scheer had agreed with Powell that they would go over the transcripts together, checking for factual accuracy and giving the Carter camp a chance to assure itself nothing was being distorted in the editing process. No exception was ever made to Playboy's policy--which is that of most other magazines--of retaining final editorial control over what was published.

In that period, Scheer placed ten calls to Powell through Atlanta headquarters and I placed several myself. In the frenzy of the campaign, Powell didn't man age to return the calls. Perhaps in retrospect, if we had left urgent messages for Powell, he might have gotten back to us. But we weren't worried--the tapes were clear and we weren't deleting much--and the Carter camp was presumably no more worried. Granum had been present for the entire final session, and if there had been anything to get upset about, he obviously would have reported it to Powell.

But as presstime approached, we became concerned about context. In early September, the campaign was relatively uneventful and we began to wonder what would happen if one or two phrases from the interview were to leak without the background in which they were spoken. It takes three weeks to print and distribute 6,500,000 copies of the magazine. By mid-September, advance copies of the November issue were available. We weren't particularly well prepared to clamp down a security curtain on the text.

What we didn't want was to have a columnist pick up a few words or sentences from the interview and publish them, and then find ourselves hamstrung by our printing schedule until we could provide the public with the entire text. Certainly, Carter's earthy remarks and his Biblical illustration of lust were on our mind, but we were also thinking of his scathing attack on the press ("The national news media have absolutely no interest in issues at all"), his admission of fallibility on civil rights and the Vietnam war, his strong views on European communism and his jab at Lyndon Johnson. Without knowing the full context, any of those statements might be jumped on. So we began improvising.

We decided to try something unprecedented: preprint enough copies of the interview, and the interview alone, to reach every media outlet with an audience or readership of over 50,000. Furthermore, we would approach the most "respectable" print and television outlets with an offer: If The New York Times and NBC's Today show would agree to treat the interview unsensationally, if they would report its full range and context, we would let them have the text exclusively for a period of time. Our thinking was that while we still had some control over it, the Times and NBC would set a tone for the rest of the media as to what was emphasized in the interview.

Far from thinking we were being crafty in the commercial sense, we went against the advice of many executives at Playboy, who argued that publicizing something three weeks in advance--to say nothing of releasing the entire text--would ensure a loss of interest by the time the magazine was available. The executives were wrong. But as to any notions we editors may have had about fair play and journalism, well, we were just as wrong.

•

Throughout the period last year during which Jimmy Carter was linked to Playboy, there was much less cunning, control or manipulation of events than anyone imagined. Just as we improvised the early release of the interview, almost everything else that happened was the result of people--both at Playboy and in the Carter camp--dealing with something they'd never encountered before. We were all winging it.

For instance, the press and the Republicans would later make much of Carter's "poor political judgment" in granting the interview in the first place. Truth is, there never was a first place. Playboy had merely assigned Scheer to write something about Carter and his campaign during the early primaries. Scheer was fresh from the Playboy Interview with Governor Jerry Brown (on which we'd collaborated in much the same way, Scheer doing the real journalistic work for months at a time, I joining him in the questioning at the last few sessions) and the idea was to get as much personal contact with Carter as possible. The fact that Brown announced for the Presidency the week his interview hit the stands--and began beating Carter in the late primaries--undoubtedly had an effect on Carter's staff. But equally important was the more personal factor that Carter's young aides were familiar with Scheer's work, and it was he who inveigled more and more interview appointments out of Carter's staff and family. It's Scheer's story to tell, but I'm not sure there was ever a moment when the Carter people formally decided to go for the Playboy Interview. Our interviewer--out of Scheer persistence, as I began to call it--simply amassed so much dialog that it seemed natural to continue to the end result. Scheer kept asking for one long session under more relaxed circumstances and Powell eventually promised it to him. Later, when Carter had won the nomination, Powell could have reneged. Instead, he honored his commitment.

There were other, equally random factors at play. Pat Anderson, Carter's chief speechwriter, supported the idea of the interview once it was under way. By coincidence, one of his last assignments as a free-lance writer before being hired by Carter was to conduct a Playboy Interview himself. It was with Keith Stroup, the marijuana activist, and we got around to publishing it only last month. Another coincidence: At a press party in New York during the week of the Democratic Convention, I ran into Carter's campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan. I thanked him for the time Carter had given us so far, reminded him that we were expecting a final session and watched for signs of reluctance. To the contrary, he was enthusiastic and caught up in the spirit of the project: "It's your readers who may be predisposed toward Jimmy," he said, "but they may not vote at all if they still feel uneasy about him."

Then there was the night before the last interview, when Scheer and I had dinner with Powell in Atlanta. I hadn't met Powell before and introduced myself by extending him best regards from Peter Ross Range, a former Time correspondent and now one of Playboy's Articles Editors. Powell mentioned that the last time he'd seen Range was late one night in a tavern, when Range had persuaded a young lady to sneak up behind Powell and place her tongue inside his ear.

Over dinner, Scheer began talking about what had emerged from the transcripts thus far and said there were areas Carter hadn't opened up on. It was a theme I knew they'd discussed before, and I chimed in that the one thing Carter hadn't dealt with effectively was his image as a packaged, holier-than-thou politician who wore his religion on his sleeve. Powell agreed, saying there were a lot of misconceptions about Carter's Baptist faith. By the end of the evening, we were in agreement that it was a topic that should be explored fully with Carter the following day. One of the last things Powell said over dinner was, "Ask him about individual autonomy in the Baptist Church, you guys. It's an interesting topic for an extended interview like yours."

Powell gave me' a lift in his battered old Volkswagen and I had one odd moment. As we drove down an Atlanta boulevard, it occurred to me that the guy next to me, grunting as he wrestled witha stubborn gearshift, would very likely be one of the most powerful men in the country in a few months. At that moment, so help me, we drove past a movie marquee with all the President's Men lettered across it. Powell saw where I was looking, grinned at me and said, "Wrong President, different men."

The irony was that the one subject we'd planned on discussing was the one that, as with so much else, emerged most accidentally during the interview the next day in Plains. It is true that Scheer had hammered away for months at the subject of Carter's pious image; and that both Powell and Carter were primed, ready to deal with it, frustrated that they hadn't dispelled it. But the fact is that Scheer and I discussed so many other issues with Carter that day that the allotted time was up before anyone had mentioned religion. And so, casually, a parting remark was made that provided an opening. As Carter began to respond, we realized he was saying what he'd tried to say before about small-town religion, about people's frailties, about human temptation. Only much later did any of us realize he was using vernacular that would shock and examples that would titillate.

•

In the months that followed, I would see a Presidential nominee waffle about remarks I knew he had made, then apologize for having spoken to us at all; an incumbent President take a moral position against the magazine and base it on a false premise; an incumbent press secretary shout curses at me over the telephone and then dissemble about his relations with the magazine in public; an election take place in the wake of charges and countercharges about that same magazine. It was a story we couldn't tell in that atmosphere, but one that no journalist would keep to himself in calmer times. Because it's about journalism.

I called The New York Times, NBC and Powell on the same day--September 15. I explained to the editors of the Times why we wanted to release the entire text of the interview and, after s reading the copy I sent them by messenger, the editors decided not to run an exclusive story on it. This decision would be questioned later, when it was announced that the Times had an upcoming interview of its own--a conversation Carter had had with Norman Mailer that had taken place several weeks after ours, wherein Carter uttered The Great Four-Letter Word. There are those who saw a conspiracy in all of this, but my guess is that the Times was improvising no less than Playboy. What's a newspaper to do when it ends up with two interviews containing "vulgarities" in the middle of a campaign?

(Since I've listed other random factors, I ought to mention one other coincidence during the week of the Democratic Convention. Scheer and I were lined up to receive our press credentials and the person in front of us happened to be Norman Mailer. I asked him what he was doing about covering politics this year. "I don't know yet," he said. "This campaign is so dull. How about you?" I replied that we were awaiting a final interview session with Carter. "You're interviewing him?" Mailer asked. "That sounds interesting.")

Tom Brokaw of the Today show did want to go with the story and we discussed the ground rules. I requested that he supply the full context of any exchanges he reported on and that Scheer and I be given time on the air to sketch in the background of the conversations. Brokaw had the same scenario in mind and agreed.

Powell had not returned my call, so I tried again and this time left an urgent message that the interview would probably become public in a few days and that I wanted to find a way to get the text to him. He finally called back a day later and we made arrangements for him to receive the full interview by messenger.

Instead of the Times (which ran a front-page story later, in any case), I contacted the Chicago bureau of the Associated Press and again asked for a guarantee of unsensational reporting. Their report would break simultaneously with the NBC report, and when an A.P. editor described the tenor their story would take, it seemed fair and responsible. Although it led with Carter on morality and temptation, it described other parts of the interview as well.

Scheer and I met in New York on Monday, September 20, and appeared on Today. As promised, Brokaw began by describing the major points of the interview, summarized the thrust of Carter's religious statements, and only then did he say that he had used some unusual language. The producers of the show had prepared extensive printed quotes to run on the screen, which seemed to us fairer than having Brokaw pluck out a few words and pronounce them.

And that's when the press went berserk.

Some days later, Scheer was back on the campaign trail and Powell spotted him in a crowd of reporters. Powell smiled ruefully and said, "You sure know how to break a story." I suppose if we'd calculated the effect it was going to have, there would have been some measure of pride in our promotional ability. But we'd simply winged it. It wasn't that we were startled innocents. Certainly, we knew that some of the words Carter used would be controversial. We thought that for a few days there would be a prudish outburst over the salty language but that the press would (continued on page 200)Jimmy Carter and US(continued from page 144) quickly enough find other matters of substance in the interview to dwell upon.

But by midafternoon of September 20, the A.P. story had found headlines: "Sex, Sin, Temptation!" "I've Committed Adultery in my Heart!" "at Last, the truth is out!" The words Playboy, lust, screw, shack up and adultery saturated the airwaves. It was banner headlines in virtually every evening paper in the country. By that night, Johnny Carson could step onstage and do ten minutes of lust jokes without explaining the source. At our New York hotel, extra lines were needed to handle the calls from reporters wanting to interview the interviewers. Carter's whistle-stop train ride, which had begun that morning, nearly ground to a halt. People in the press compartment were lined up, sharing hastily Xeroxed copies of the interview.

Between giving statements to the rest of the press ("Yes. it was, a sincere statement of his religious beliefs." "No, we were not discussing his sex life."), I managed to get through to our offices in Chicago, where the switchboard was also jammed.

"What the hell is going on?" I yelled at Kretchmer.

"Damned if I know. The country's going crazy."

It seemed to be. A day or two later, there was still no letup, "is Carter Screwing up Campaign.?" screamed the headlines. Columnists couldn't churn out copy quickly enough, ministers couldn't find words to express their shock (Carter should have condemned people who "shack down," stuttered one man of the cloth) and Republicans could hardly reach enough reporters to file their denunciations. Every cartoonist in America uttered shrieks of delight and leaped to the drawing board. It had made the front pages of newspapers in Europe, Japan and South America. Any part, any chunk of the story would do: on an inside page, a roundup of psychiatrists' opinions reporting the stunning news mat male lust was "normal." Mike Royko announced that he had had "dirty thoughts" and that confessing to them made him feel better already. Art Buchwald claimed it was chicken cacciatore that made his breathing heavy. Rosalynn Carter, ambushed at every campaign stop, choked out that she "trusted Jimmy completely" and fought her way through reporters. Walter Mondale's wife announced that he had admitted to lust and that, come to think of it, she'd felt a twinge or two herself. Both of Carter's older sons told the press they'd lusted, too. Woody Allen declared he'd done it often, only he'd been caught at it.

Watching and hearing and reading about it from our offices in Chicago was something else, Playboy has always been good copy, no matter what the story, but this was another order of publicity. As we staggered into one another's offices, bringing news of the latest development, an awareness slowly dawned on us: The American press, by God, was considerably more obsessed by sex than was Playboy.

At least it seemed that way. We weren't running around shouting about lust and screwing and adultery, either in person or in the magazine. (Not to take playboy completely off the hook, our cover lines on that issue seem to me pretty strident in retrospect and our advertising--whose budget was actually slashed at the last moment--made the magazine appear to some as exploitative.) Still, we hadn't even considered the quotes important enough to place them under the three pictures on the lead page, the traditional slots for the most newsworthy remarks of the Playboy Interview. It was more than mere irony: Every time Scheer and I made a statement about the context of Carter's remarks, the fellows from Playboy were doing the talking about religion and morality, while the TV correspondents and reporters for family newspapers were doing the nudging and leering.

And Carter himself? At first, he held firm. Asked about the interview, he said he hadn't had a chance to read it all, that he usually looked at other parts of the magazine first. Asked about it again, he called it a good, thorough interview about which he had no regrets. Asked by a woman reporter what his wife would think, he smiled, touched the woman's cheek and said, "She knows." Asked again, he said he didn't believe it would hurt him. And again, No, no, if it was read in context, it was fine. And again and again.

By the day after the first debate, we figured the storm had passed. At least Carter, who had looked shaken on television for reasons beyond the debate itself, would be able to deal with more pressing issues in the campaign. But on Friday morning, I got a call from Scheer, who was still on the campaign trail. He was calling from a telephone booth at the Houston airport and, in the background, I could hear Carter's voice giving a speech over a loud-speaker.

"Hey, Barry, it's just hit the fan again," Scheer said. "It's the L.B.J. quote and he's tried to wriggle out of it and he's doing a bad job of it."

Carter's schedule had him in Texas at the very moment when the press had apparently become sexually sated and turned its attention to his jab at Johnson, whom he had linked to Richard Nixon in the closing moments of the interview as a politician who "lied, cheated and distorted the truth." A couple of Texas Democrats, loyal to the memory of L.B.J., had denounced Carter. The press, perhaps forgetting that Johnson had been a pariah at the Democratic Conventions of 1968 and 1972, was calling it a major political blunder and the columnists declared Ford a winner in Texas.

Over the telephone, Scheer described a remarkable scene that had just taken place. Since Carter was still being pelted at every stop with questions about the Playboy Interview, even now, after the first debate, he had agreed to an extensive discussion of it. He had first said he didn't remember using the word screw in our presence, but he didn't deny it. Then, pressed on the L.B.J. quote, he said:

"The unfortunate thing about the magazine interview was the postinterview statement about President Johnson, which completely distorts my feeling about him.... After the interview was over, there was a summary made, and unfortunately it equated" what had been said about Nixon and about Johnson.

This was news. It was apparently a summary made by Playboy, Carter was saying. A reporter asked him if he had said what the interview quoted him as saying.

"I realize that," Carter said, lapsing into non sequitur, "it was an analysis that was made at the completion of the interview.... The unfortunate juxtaposition of these two names in the Playboy article grossly misrepresents the way I feel about Johnson."

Carter then began to walk away. A number of reporters rushed off to file stories to the effect that Playboy had made the summary, not Carter. And as Scheer related it to me, the reporters who were still there turned to Scheer, who was standing nearby, and asked him for a response. Nope, he said quietly, the summary was Carter's exact words and, as the tapes would show, it was all very clearly on the record. The remaining reporters rushed up to Carter as he was walking away and pressed him again.

Yes, Carter finally admitted, they were his words, he had made a mistake and he apologized for it. "But," he added, "I thought the interview was over. The Playboy folks were leaving the house."

Hearing about the episode made me uneasy for the first time. It was no longer a matter of being fascinated at the media's titillation. The pressure had become so intense for Carter that, for a few moments, at least, he'd had to deal with the problem by--distorting the truth.

Throughout the next couple of weeks, the focus on the Playboy Interview hardly wavered. Newsweeklies and columnists vied with one another for new adjectives: There was the "celebrated" and "historic" interview, followed by "ill-advised," "infamous" and "notorious." Curiously, it continued to be the press, and not necessarily the public, that gave it such sweeping importance. Although Newsweek loaded its questions in a poll showing that 18 percent of the voting public was distressed by the interview, a New York Times/CBS poll asked it straight: Has Carter lost your vote because of the interview? Two percent of the public said it would be less apt to vote for Carter. Less scientific soundings, such as man-in-the-street interviews, failed to turn up widespread concern--and among those who had read fuller accounts or read the interview itself, even approval.

Having done all that was possible with Carter's language, lust and the Johnson remark, the focus narrowed to Carter's judgment in granting the interview at all. Carter's Republican opponents took particular pleasure in that, as everyone from Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller on down asked whether a man who had let himself be interviewed by such a raunchy mag were deserving of the high office. And for a while, no one contradicted them. One Carter aide protested that Playboy hadn't been picked because of the centerfold but because of another equally well-known feature not available in other publications or media--the extended interview. To no avail. Even a good political reporter like Jack Germond of The Washington Star wrote, "Dole and almost all politicians of national standing...have repeatedly rejected offers to be interviewed in Playboy." That's what a journalism professor would call not checking your facts. Eventually, some members of the media challenged the assumption that Carter had joined a roster of perverts by listing such former interview subjects as Martin Luther King, Jr., Princess Grace, Albert Schweitzer, Charles Percy, George McGovern, Walter Cronkite, and so forth. The fact that Rockefeller had been interviewed by Scheer for a Playboy article slipped out and Rocky wasn't heard from again on the subject. I was itching to release a letter from Gerald Ford's Treasury Secretary, William Simon, after his interview, thanking the magazine for the opportunity to reach the public. Or the letter from the press secretary of Ford's successor as Minority Leader, John Rhodes, asking that we consider Rhodes as an interview subject so he could lambaste the "lackluster Democratic Congress." I didn't.

•

The second debate took place in San Francisco. In the course of it, Max Frankel of The New York Times asked Ford a question that allowed Ford to start by attacking Carter for being "sympathetic" toward Communists in western Europe, then inveighing against any person who dared think Eastern Europe was dominated by the Soviet Union. Frankel, in effect, said, Whaa? So Ford compounded it by giving examples of independent nations in Eastern Europe; among them, Poland.

It was Garry Wills who pointed out in a column ten days later that while Ford's supporters had made the most of denouncing Carter's very appearance in Playboy, one of Ford's main sources of preparation for the theme of the second debate--foreign policy--had been the interview itself. Ford studied the interview and apparently thought he saw a vulnerability in the section of the interview where Carter told us he would offer trade and friendship to western European governments even if there were Communist participation, but that he would take a relatively hard line against Eastern European nations "dominated by the Soviet Union." In our interview, Carter had offered Poland as an example of a "satellite state" of the Soviets. In no other news medium had Carter been so specific--perhaps because he hadn't been asked.

The media made a great deal of Ford's mistake in the following weeks, declaring that it had cost him the ethnic vote. That was before the media changed their minds and pronounced it trivial. In any case, a Gallup Poll after the election dated Ford's loss of momentum in the opinion polls to this incident.

Triviality was. indeed, the next shift of the wind. The Playboy connection was too good to drop altogether, but now writers and editorialists were branding the entire flap "trivial," castigating the candidates for distracting the public from more serious issues. Since we hadn't seen much evidence up to then that it was the candidates who kept bringing the subject up, it struck us as a little like the kettle calling the kettle black.

Under yet more pressure, Carter told a TV interviewer that Playboy hadn't sent him transcripts, as promised--implying that the whole flap would have been avoided had we done so. We sympathized with his attempt to try out yet one more explanation, but it was wishful thinking on his part: We've asked interview subjects to look over their transcripts in the past, but not for purposes of retraction. Carter also charged that it was Playboy that had taken an excerpt out of context and "pulled a publicity stunt" with it--which may not have been accurate but, under the circumstances, was understandable: Playboy magazine was certainly a better political target than the entire press corps. We decided not to respond to the charges.

Things got downright schizophrenic. Columnist Pat Buchanan would bluster about Carter's deplorable judgment in associating with a worthless magazine, then finish his column by discussing other, more serious aspects of Carter's views--for which Buchanan's source had been the Playboy Interview. David Susskind would host a show about press coverage of the campaign, leading journalists would solemnly agree how trivial a topic the Playboy Interview was, then move on to discuss at great length Carter's charges that the press wasn't interested in issues--a remark they had read in Playboy. There were dozens of other examples, but if I tell you that conservative columnist James Kilpatrick, who fretted over Carter's interview on 60 Minutes, is the same James Kilpatrick who wrote a witty piece for Playboy several years ago on the dangers of falling toilet seats, I'm sure you'll get my general drift.

It all turned a little weird, too. The magazine's cover girl and Playmate in that issue was Patti McGuire, who happened to be a volunteer worker for Christopher Bond, the Republican governor running for re-election in Patti's home state of Missouri. False rumors spread through the state that the magazine's cover line, "Our C.B. Playmate," which clearly referred to Patti's interest in citizen's-band radios, was really a hidden message that she was having an affair with the governor whose initials were on the cover. As it happened, Bond lost his re-election bid. Let historians make of it what they will.

But then it turned ugly. One of our editors was told that, immediately after the news of Carter's interview broke, some well-heeled Republicans had paid to track down rumors that Jimmy and Rosalynn had been involved in wife swapping. We were told that some $500,000 had been spent pursuing this lead--in vain, of course. We would have assumed that the report of expenditures was as false as the rumor itself, but then Jack Anderson provided some corroboration when he announced that he and other journalists had been tipped to the same story by Republican sources.

Then came a flap over a series of Republican ads, which were placed in over 350 Southern newspapers, showing a Newsweek cover of Ford and the Playboy cover, suggesting voters make a choice based on the respectability of the two publications. While we at Playboy considered what legal steps to take to halt the ads, Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh Hefner received a call in Los Angeles from Ford's legal counsel, Benton Becker. It wasn't about the ads, as we might have expected, but to get support for what Becker said was "a solid rumor" that Playboy had paid Carter for the interview. Hefner denied it curtly.

In early October, Ford volunteered that he, too, had been asked to do the Playboy Interview but had turned it down. A week later, he again brought up the subject, saying at a news conference that he was invited to do an interview "such as Carter did" but had refused "emphatically" on the grounds that it was un-Presidential to associate with a magazine with "that format." All well and good. Even at Playboy, the statement seemed to ring true, since it was Congressman Gerald Ford who had tried to have Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas impeached for, among other crimes, having written articles for such publications as Evergreen Review and Playboy.

But it wasn't true. We had never asked Ford to do the Playboy Interview. Ironically, last spring, when it became apparent that the Carter staff was cooperating in Scheer's interviews with their candidate, we at Playboy discussed asking Ford for the same kind of interview. We didn't think it would be out of the question, considering Carter's participation and the prospect of running them side by side. But we decided not to go after it, because we felt Ford was largely a known quantity and we could do a more effective job in bringing out Carter, an unknown quantity.

After Ford's second statement, we began getting queries about it. As Hefner and Kretchmer and I discussed it, all we knew was that we felt damned nervous about getting Playboy any more involved in the campaign than it already was. We did decide, however, that if we were pressed, we would tell the truth.

After Robert Dole in the Vice-Presidential TV debate leeringly referred to "the Bunny vote" and after a fanatic minister, W. A. Criswell, publicly endorsed Ford in the name of all Southern Baptists for not having granted Playboy an interview, we began to wonder if we shouldn't speak out. It wasn't until the third Presidential debate, however, when Carter was asked about the "low level" of his campaign and he finally gave up the ghost by apologizing for the Playboy Interview, that some of us felt we'd become a political football. (Curiously, in his apology during the debate, Carter listed some prominent people who'd been interviewed in Playboy, and then he said, "But they weren't running for President." For the record, George Wallace, George McGovern and Jerry Brown did run for the office--and other politicians who cooperated with Playboy, such as Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater, weren't exactly shy about the Presidency, either. What they didn't do is win.)

Right after the third debate, Barbara Walters interviewed Rosalynn Carter and asked her about the Playboy Interview her husband presumably had just disposed of once and for all. "What about the language, Mrs. Carter?" Walters asked. Mrs. Carter then launched into a long answer, repeating the charge that Playboy had never sent her husband transcripts and ending with a remarkable personal swipe at us. She said that her husband never used that sort of language in his home and that the reason he'd done it in the Playboy Interview was that "they"-- Scheer and I--were using that kind of language around him. In other words, we made Jimmy do it.

The truth is that on that day in Plains, the atmosphere was subdued and serious, and the only person to use colloquial language was Jimmy Carter, in his own home--and only to illustrate an important point. But between Ford and an obviously tired, beleaguered Mrs. Carter, it was all becoming a bit too strange. The election was now a week away.

Since some journalist acquaintances were pressing me for a statement on the so-called Ford refusal, we decided it was time to act. I called Ron Nessen, Ford's press secretary, at the White House, introduced myself and told him that there was a problem: We were being asked to comment on the President's refusal of our request for the interview and we had no recollection of making the request. I asked him what they were basing their statement on. Nessen brusquely told me he had a letter to prove it and that he'd get back to me the next day. I told him that we were being pressed hard on the subject and could he possibly tell me before the next day what letter he was referring to?

"Listen, goddamn you," Nessen shouted. "I've told you I can prove it, and if you want to challenge me, it's your own fucking funeral!"

I was winging it again. I hadn't known Presidential press secretaries were so free with their language, and I urged him to calm down and not be hostile. If the letter were available, I'd appreciate hearing from him, because I was going to have to say something. Nessen hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a call from the White House and Nessen was on the phone, telling me without preamble that a letter dated July 15, 1975, to a Playboy editor constituted a definite refusal by Ford of the Playboy Interview. I thanked him.

I had a copy of the letter he was referring to and I also knew Nessen and Ford were splitting the finest of hairs. Briefly, what had occurred was that our editor had written to Nessen more than a year earlier about an article that Richard Rhodes, a novelist and writer on political subjects, was preparing on Gerald Ford. Our editor had written that Rhodes would be in Washington during August 1975 and requested Nessen's help in providing him with access to the White House staff for a profile of Ford. He also asked if a "20-minute meeting" with the President could be arranged, so that Rhodes could describe Ford's "physical presence" to our readers.

Nessen replied in writing that he was interested in helping in any way to prepare the article, which would include (his words) a "Presidential interview." but that the President would be vacationing for most of August. He urged Playboy to contact him again. This letter, Nessen said, constituted a refusal by Ford to do a Playboy Interview.

On October 27, 1976, Hefner released a statement to the wire services condemning Ford's election committee for making political use of Carter's interview. I was quoted to the effect that not only had we never asked Ford for the interview but the White House had cooperated in two earlier efforts by playboy to do stories about Ford.

The effort before the Rhodes incident had to do with a satirical piece Playboy published in September 1974, just a month after Ford took office. Titled I Am Jerry's Brain, it described the workings of a befuddled Presidential cerebrum. A week after the magazine went on sale, we got a call from the White House. One of the President's speechwriters at the time, Paul Theis, was on the phone. He asked to speak with the author of the piece, Reg Potterton, and told Potterton he'd just been with Ford, that Ford had read and enjoyed the piece and that the President would like to invite him to the White House for a few days to observe "how the real ferry Ford's brain works."

In fact, we sent Potterton to Washington for a few days--and have records of it filed under President ford Feature--but Potterton himself suddenly had to depart for England on another assignment before taking the White House up on its invitation.

At any rate, we were in the headlines again with our statement. The press got to Nessen, who was traveling with Ford through Chicago that day, and Nessen released the letter to our editor and said it constituted a "polite but firm refusal" of a request for the Playboy Interview. He denied my account of the earlier example of cooperation and said that the letter was the last correspondence he had had with Playboy, thus proving his statement that it was a refusal, not a mere postponement.

The papers and networks ran our statement, as well as Nessen's denial, with most reports calling it a standoff. That's when things became tense. That day, in Chicago, a TV reporter asked Ford for his version of the so-called Playboy refusal. Suddenly, Nessen stepped in and said, "No, no, that's not fair."

The reporter was surprised and said, "What's not fair? I can't ask him?" Nessen said he would not permit it and ended the interview abruptly.

Offcamera, several of the reporters pursued Nessen after Ford had left, asking him why he had cut them off, and didn't that constitute a kind of censorship? "Fuck you!" Nessen yelled.

The local Chicago stations reported the altercation on their news programs that evening with some puzzlement, wondering aloud why Nessen was so nervous after he had publicly denied our statement and released the letter. The press did not check back with Playboy after Nessen's denial, but the fact is that Nessen was dissembling, with or without Ford's knowledge.

The question of whether or not to expose Nessen was tricky. We were seenas having been responsible for the great controversy surrounding Carter; here we were, four days away from the election, in a pissing match with the Ford White House. We decided there was no way we could make another public statement without its being interpreted as interfering in the election. So we kept quiet. We felt most people who cared one way or another--not as to whether Ford might have been in Playboy but as to whether the President were telling the truth--had at least seen that there was some doubt on the matter.

What we kept quiet about was that we not only had documentation of Potterton's visit to Washington in 1974 but, more significantly, had copies of further correspondence on the Rhodes affair up to six weeks after Nessen claimed all correspondence had ceased--copies of which he chose not to release. What happened was that our Articles Editor contacted Nessen after the vacation period of August 1975 was over. Nessen replied in a letter dated August 31, 1975, that everyone at the White House was back from vacation, that Rhodes should come to Washington and that he, Nessen, would arrange interviews with members of the White House staff.

Rhodes went to Washington, had his interviews and talked with Nessen. They discussed the possibility of Rhodes's meeting with the President; again, merely to write about his physical presence. Nessen agreed and suggested that the best way for Rhodes to talk with Ford was to accompany him on an upcoming trip. Nessen then arranged for Rhodes to fly on the White House press plane, which he did on September 12 and 13. But we at Playboy got in touch with Rhodes as the Presidential party set down in St. Louis and insisted he write the article without meeting Ford in order to meet our deadline. There is a White House bill in our files for Rhodes's air fare on the Presidential press jet.

•

The final effect of Playboy's interview with Jimmy Carter on the 1976 Presidential campaign is hard to measure. If it was just a distraction, as many now claim, all I can say is that it didn't feel that way to those of us who participated in it. It did get petty, but I think it's fair to ask why. Certainly Carter's impulse to be a little too loose and hip with us had something to do with it. And certainly the touch of Tartufe that came through in Ford and some of his supporters played a part. And, in retrospect, the way we released the interview added to the confusion. But the true obsession that evolved wasn't Carter's or Ford's or Playboy's.

Two snippets on the subject, the first a reader's letter to The Washington Star:

Recent history proves Mr. Carter right and the national press wrong on most matters of substance. Just because he has a unique and personal way of presenting his candidacy, the press gets all hot and bothered. Mr. Carter has shown us, again and again, that a good "press image" is only the concern of the press, not of the people.

This from a distance; an editorial in the London Guardian:

The Carter that emerges from Playboy is a simpler, more tangible man than any previous portrayal has contrived. He worries. He admits errors. He feels angry enough about racialism to wonder if he is in the right business. His shoulder is chipped. Under pressure, he prays rather than drinks bourbon. A short skirt can throw him.... His soul is a little barer now, and maybe it will do him harm. But before the easy sneers proliferate, the easy sneerers might ponder what we want of our politicians.

Finally, every time I've mentioned the word media, I've been guilty of generalizations, too. Many writers and journalists--among them, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post--were quick to say, Come on, you guys, knock it off. And many newspapers--among them, the Chicago Sun-Times--asked, Why all the fuss? And it was good to see the press regain a nonnasty sense of humor about it all as the campaign drew to a close: Awarding Carter a plaque for "horniest" member of the 1976 campaign was nice, as was the button given to Rosalynn (which reportedly broke her up): I Lust for Jimmy. It took a while, but maybe we were all beginning to see the joke-- and the self-mockery--at the end.

Speaking of the end, public-opinion polls on Election Day showed that 61 percent of voters were not politically affected by Carter's interview; 20 percent said they were negatively affected; 11 percent said they were positively affected. Our own readership survey showed an overwhelmingly positive response toward Carter as he came across in the interview; a 20 percent higher proportion of people who said they had actually voted than the national average; and, for those of you curious about such things, we sold about 1,300,000 more copies than normal in November--which is nearly the margin by which Carter beat Ford in the popular vote.

Now, nobody around these parts claims these figures mean anything. Unless they're useful as cocktail-party retorts to whatever the conventional wisdom is about the election by the time this is published. I don't know if there are any lessons about the nature of politics to be drawn from all this. But I can think of a few lessons it teaches about the media in our society. Lesson number one: If you're going to wing it, fasten your seat belt.

Copyright © 1976, Chicago Sun-Times. Reproduced by Courtesy of Wil-Jo Associates, Inc., and Bill Mauldin.

To the country's cartoonists, Jimmy Carter's "Playboy Interview" was a gift from heaven--or at least from Plains, Georgia. The conversation with the candidate ranged over many things, but when the subject of lust was touched upon, it all became too good to pass up. Rabbits and Bunnies proliferated on editorial pages, the Democratic donkey was transformed into an equally familiar symbol, the Statue of Liberty never looked better and Carter's wandering thoughts became a campaign issue. At first. Carter defended the interview as a good one, but as pressure-- mostly from the media--mounted, he began to step back from it.

Copyright ©1976 Chicago Sun-Times Reproduced by Courtesy of Wil-Jo Associates, Inc., and Bill Mauldin.

Paul Conrad Copyright © 1976, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with Permission.

Hugh Haynie Copyright © 1976, The Courier-Journal

Oliphant Copyright © 1976 Washington Star, Reprinted with Permission.

Republican lust to retain the White House become stronger as Carter's opponents sensed a vulnerable issue: It was, they charged, "un-Presidential" to appear in Playboy. A few commentators (and cartoonists) suggested that Republicans lived in glass houses, especially since Playboy had interviewed many prominent Republicans through the years. Things took a serious turn when the Ford Committee produced newspaper ads (right) contrasting Newsweek and Playboy. Both magazines protested the partisan use of their covers and the ads were withdrawn, but not before Playboy Editor-Publisher Hugh M. Hefner denounced the Ford Committee for trying to make it seem as if granting the interview were equivalent to "posing nude in the centerfold." Then, in response to Ford's repeated statements that he had turned down an offer to do such an interview, Playboy editors announced that no such offer had been made. The entire affair made one cartoonist suggest, just a few days before the election, that voters in 1976 were flocking to a new kind of polling place--a Playboy Club.

Paul Conrad Copyright © 1976, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with Permission.